L2 effects on L1 in foreign language learners: An exploratory study on object pronouns and verb placement in wh-questions in Polish

This study investigates L2 effects on L1 grammar in foreign language learners. As partof a cross-sectional study, 25 Polish native speakers learning English and German, and16 Polish monolingual speakers participated in an acceptability judgment test in Polish The test involved two grammatical phenomena: anaphoric object pronouns which lie at thesyntax-pragmatics interface, and verb placement in wh-questions, which is a propertyof narrow syntax. The analysis shows that multilingual learners accepted overt anaphoricobject pronouns in a sentence-internal position significantly more frequently than monolingual speakers from the control group. Object pronouns in the native language seem to bean element open to the influence of a foreign language, in contrast to linguistic propertieswhich are solely syntactic. This study thus confirms that interface phenomena are moreprone to cross-linguistic influence than purely syntactic features, but it also extends thisthesis to include L2 effect on L1

Prosodic Interactions in Anishinaabemowin Verbs

This research aims to better understand the link between prosody and verbs in Anishinaabemowin by investigating pitch placement in relation to verb placement in Anishinaabemowin utterances. The data is from a story by Ogimaawigwaebiik archived in Dibaajimowinaan; Anishinaabe Stories of Culture and Respect. Anishinaabemowin, also known as Ojibwe, is a member of the Algonquin language family and is spoken throughout Southern Ontario and the Northern United States (Fairbanks, 2017). It is a polysynthetic language meaning it primarily uses affixes to convey meaning, particularly on the verbs. Prosody is the organization of various linguistics units (words, pitch, tone) into an utterance in the process of speech production. It conveys not only linguistics information but also contextual cues, intentions and attitudes (Fujisaki, 1997). This research utilized two audio softwares, Audacity and Praat, to clean and segment the audio into utterances and then token sentences were selected based on verb placement (verb initial, verb second and verb final). These token sentences will be analyzed for pitch placement and then compared to see if verb placement affects prosody, further expanding on the current literature which states that pitch defaults to the verb (Frazier, accepted). This research is particularly important because there is a gap in existing literature on prosody in Anishinaabemowin and there are no experimental studies such as this. References: Fairbanks, B. (2017). Ojibwe Discourse Markers. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press. Frazier, S., Déchaine, R.M, & Dufresne, M. (accepted). The Syntax of Discourse: What an Anishinaabemowin Oral Text Teaches Us. 2020 CLA Proceedings. Fujisaki, H. (1997). Prosody, models, and spontaneous speech. In Computing prosody (pp. 27-42). Springer, New York, NY. Ogimaawigwaebiik [Nancy Jones] 2013. Gakina Dibaajimowin Gwayakwaawan. In Dibaajimowinaan; Anishinaabe Stories of Culture and respect; Nigaanigiizhig [Jim Saint-Arnold] (ed.), Great Lakes Indian Fish & Wildlife Commission, 9-10.

Verb placement in embedded sentences in Faroese

In this article, I present data from the Nordic Word order Database (NWD) on word order in Faroese embedded clauses. I discuss the methods used in the data elicitation, data analysis, and present a first overview of the patterns in the dataset. The NWD contains a total of 4,752 embedded clauses elicited from 33 native Faroese speakers, focussing on embedded wh-questions, and the placement of the finite verb with respect to adverbs in different types of complements. The results from the Faroese fieldwork largely confirm the word order patterns discussed in the literature. There is very little variation in the word order of embeddded wh-questions in the NWD-data. Verb > Adverb order is most common in declarative bridge-verb complements, whereas non-bridge, and wh-complements disfavour this order.

Entwicklung der Verbstellung beim fortgeschrittenen Erwerb des Deutschen als Fremdsprache

This article investigates the acquisition of verb placement in German as a foreign language at an advanced stage of development. The main objective of the investigation is to analyse written and spoken language production in terms of the use of subject-verb-inversion, verbal bracket, and verb-final placement in subordinate clauses. The results reveal a discrepancy between written and spoken language production with respect to correct usage of the verb placement rules. While correctness in the written production task exceeded 97% for all phenomena, the oral translation task generated less correct sentences, but only for inversion and verb-final placement. The non-target usage of inversion and verb-final pattern in spoken production points to processing problems when translating from Polish into German, which are further confirmed by lower accuracy for these two phenomena. At the moment of testing, the verbal bracket has already been acquired, which is in line with the universal developmental sequence in the acquisition of German syntax.

To hón ich imma insistieat

This paper investigates syntactic variation in Hunsrückisch German, spoken in a language enclave in South Brazil over eight generations. The aim is to analyse whether this heritage language maintains asymmetric verb placement, i.e. verb-second in main clauses and verb-final in subordinate clauses, a prominent syntactic feature of German varieties. The analysis is based on a sample of 5000 sentences, produced by participants belonging to two generations of Hunsrückisch speakers: 10 older speakers (age: 55–75), and 10 younger adults (age: 25–40). The results show a general stability of asymmetric verb placement in both speaker groups, as has also been observed for other German language islands. This stability is a consequence of the active use of this minority language, not only by the older, but also by the younger generation of speakers, who are dominant in Brazilian Portuguese (BP). Variation to verb-second and verb-final order is conditioned by the same factors as in colloquial and dialectal German, and cannot be attributed to cross-linguistic influence from BP.

Old Gallo-Romance, periodization, and the left periphery

This chapter seeks to reappraise the value of periodization for both early French and Occitan, by analysing a range of syntactic changes including verb placement, inversion effects, the structure of the left periphery, the null subject system and the particle SI. On this basis, it is argued that in syntactic terms there is some value in assigning the label ‘middle’ to a particular period in the history of French, whereas there is minimal empirical basis to assign the same label to a particular stage in the history of Occitan. Overall in terms of comparative Romance syntactic typology this is linked to the fact that medieval and modern Occitan are syntactically closer to the ‘southern’ Romance prototype than French.

The role of ambiguity in child errors

This chapter compares two contrasting approaches to accounting for the verb placement errors in child Swiss German that are described in Schönenberger (2001). The first is a learning model that captures the errors because it both learns from ambiguous input and has a rich hypothesis space of interacting parameters (Gould 2017). The second captures the errors instead by means of a cognitive bias early in development, namely a heuristic for Dependency Length Minimization (DLM) (cf. Futrell et al. 2015). The latter approach is notable in that it (a) does not rely on learning from ambiguous input to capture child errors (cf. Sakas and Fodor 2001), (b) offers a prima facie simpler way of capturing the errors, and (c) is novel in applying DLM to account for child errors. Nevertheless, closer investigation shows that a DLM-based model does not provide a principled account of the children’s developmental trajectory and is clearly not any simpler than the alternative. Further, there is some reason to think more generally that DLM does not play a role in the development of the Swiss German children during the course of Schönenberger’s study. In contrast, an approach based on parameter interaction does provide the desired principled account. This comparison provides support for a non-biased learning model that has parameter interaction and learns from ambiguous input.

Object pronoun fronting and the nature of Verb Second in early English

This chapter examines the nature of the V2 syntax of early English, with an empirical focus on Object Pronoun Fronting. It is claimed that early English, which exhibits both V2 and V3 orders, is similar to a true V2 language like German with respect to XP-fronting: both require one EPP-feature in the CP-domain; and if the presence of an EPP-feature is not motivated by an active interpretive feature, an EPP-feature is inserted and gives rise to Formal Movement (FM). What distinguishes early English from true V2 languages is that in the latter, there cannot be more than one EPP-feature, while in early English, there can be more than one. This difference in the number of EPP-features is related to a difference in verb placement within the CP-domain. Finally, some consequences of this analysis for the diachronic developments in the Middle English period are explored.

The role of variation of verb placement in the input

This chapter focuses on the acquisition of verb placement in German relative clauses (RCs). Under specific licensing conditions RCs allow for variation in word order: The finite verb can surface either in final or in second position; instances of the latter position are referred to as iV2 structures. To address the question of how children deal with this alternation in the Primary Linguistic Data, a picture-supported delayed-imitation task was developed requiring the repetition of iV2 structures and verb-final RCs, and 23 monolingual German-speaking children aged 3;0 to 3;9 and 21 adults were tested. Children repeated significantly more V-final than iV2 structures correctly and exhibited a robust preference for verb-final RCs over iV2 structures, changing verb placement from V2 to verb-final significantly more often than from verb-final to V2. Adults repeated both verb-final RCs and iV2 structures target-like. It is argued that in the case of variation in the primary linguistic data children opt for the underspecified value that stands in a superset relationship with the other variant. It is proposed that children’s preference for verb-final verb placement, i.e. the superset value, results from the interplay between two factors: (a) an economy-based learning strategy and (b) an early underspecified COMP domain.